Flow Battery Aspirant Imergy Has Let Go Its Staff and Is Selling Its Assets

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Sherwood Partners, corporate undertaker, "has been engaged by Imergy to market and sell the Company’s assets, including all of its valued intellectual property assets," according to an offering obtained by GTM -- in case you're interested in starting a flow battery company on the cheap.

According to the document:

"Unfortunately, current investors have chosen not to continue to support the Company’s ongoing operations. As a result, Imergy entered into an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (“ABC”), a form of insolvency under California state law, on Monday, July 18, 2016."

"As a result of the ABC, the Company recently terminated its employees and ceased operations. However, the Assignee has retained the services of many of the key former employees to assist with the sale of the intellectual property and related assets."

Flow battery developer Imergy, the former Deeya, raised more than $100 million from Technology Partners, NEA, DFJ, BlueRun Ventures and SunEdison to commercialize a long-duration energy storage solution. (GTM Squared took a deep look at this technology here.) The company pivoted from its original iron-chromium chemistry to a vanadium electrolyte in 2013. Imergy also moved from the sulfuric acid usually used with vanadium to another acid, which aimed to reduce the problem of hydrogen forming in the charged electrolyte.

The now-bankrupt SunEdison had agreed to buy up to 1,000 of Imergy's 30-kilowatt units over the next three years for deployment in, wait for it, India, of course. It was by far the biggest single mirage of an order that Imergy -- or perhaps any other flow battery manufacturer -- had ever received. And it disappeared just like SunEdison.

The offering letter makes some brave claims on the firm's cost-competitiveness, asserting that Imergy can "reduce the manufacturing costs of the flow batteries from $500 per kilowatt-hour, already an industry benchmark, to under $300 per kilowatt-hour."

The energy storage market is dynamic and growing -- the U.S. deployed 226 megawatts of storage in 2015, up 251 percent over 2014, according to GTM Research.

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